He hurried up the grand staircase, staying close to the wall and trying not to make too much noise. He stopped just before reaching the second-floor hall and pushed his back against the wall. The family was descending the third-floor steps. He sus-pected they would go past the walls at the bottom and come down the hallway.
A loud creaking came from below him. Phemus was put-ting his weight on the first step. “Shhh,” Taksidian said.
He thought about how he wanted to do this. What strat-egy would best accomplish his goal of putting all of the Kings into shallow graves out back? Well, maybe not the little girl, he reminded himself. He owed the Atlantian royals one female. It would be too perfect if he could solve all of his nagging problems in one easy burst of activity.
The girl could be leading the Kings’ charge down the stairs. Better not use the blade right off, he thought. Stop them first, then cut everyone but her. He had no doubts that he could take them out without a hitch. What were a teacher and three kids to him? He’d defeated squads of royal guards, other assassins. He was so sure of success, he allowed himself a brief thought of the trophies he’d take: a finger from one, a foot from another . . . He’d have his enemy-body-part artwork—which the boy Xander had destroyed—back together in no time.
He had not wanted it to come to this, to killing the fam-ily and making their bodies disappear. It was always better if they left on their own. With today’s sophisticated crime inves-tigations— fingerprints, DNA—it was getting more difficult to get away with nasty business. Deceit and murder were so much easier in worlds before such scientific advancements.
He shifted the knife in his hand, positioning it for a first blunt blow, then a slicing attack.
He heard their footsteps coming through the false walls.
Here we go.
They were right around the corner, running. He swung the knife—the rounded metal end of the handle first—and took the last step up onto the hall floor.
He made contact, saw instantly that he’d hit the older boy in the face. Gleaming streams of blood—Taksidian’s eyes were accustomed to spotting the liquid evidence of success— flew out of the wound. The kid was going down, the others behind him crashing into him.
Taksidian pulled the knife back—time to start slicing.
Someone slipped around the falling boy and shot forward. The woman! Where had she come from?
In that instant of shock at seeing her, he’d given her the advantage. She slammed her two outstretched hands into his chest, and he stumbled back, down the stairs. He felt himself fall into the banister, felt it—and heard it—breaking under his weight. Then he was plunging. He landed on his back in the foyer. His head cracked down on the wood floor.
CHAPTER
fifty-seven
SATURDAY, 1:30 P. M.
David had skidded into Toria and couldn’t believe his eyes. He had watched Mom lunge forward and shove Taksidian right through the stair railing. Yeah!
Mom’s eyes caught something at the bottom of the stairs and she grimaced, wide-eyed. “The man!” she yelled. “The one who took me!”
“Phemus!” David said. “We have to go.”
Dad stepped around him and picked up Toria.
David bent over Xander, who’d made a hard landing on the floor. His brother was holding his chin. When he pulled his hand away to look at it, David saw blood too.
“Dae,” Xander said. “My chin! Just like Jesse’s dad said. It’s happening. Run, David, run!”
David staggered back and looked both directions down the hall. Where? Where? The linen closet portal to the school locker—it was the nearest exit from the house. He started for it, and Dad grabbed his arm.
“Wait,” Dad said, shifting Toria in his arms. “I have an idea.”
CHAPTER
fifty-eight
SATURDAY, 1:31 P. M.
Taksidian stared at the crystal chandelier above him. He raised his head and shook it to scatter the little black dots dancing in front of his eyes. Phemus leaned over him and held out a hand.
“What are you doing?” Taksidian said. “Go get them!”
Phemus turned and headed for the stairs.
Taksidian gazed at the broken banister. Spindles jutted out, away from the stairs, like hideous dental work. He heard whispering. The Kings were still up there on the second floor. What are they thinking?
He reached under him, found the thing pushing into his back, and pulled it out. A broken mobile phone. He hurled it into the kitchen. He rolled over, pushed himself up, and grabbed the knife off the floor as he stood. He rushed up the stairs, catching up with Phemus at the top. Three of the family—the mom and two boys—dashed past in the hall, heading for the false walls and the third-floor stairs.
Taksidian paused to figure out what was going on: The little girl was pounding on the linen closet door, saying, “Hurry, Daddy, hurry!” It was from that direction that Mom, Xander, and David had run. They must have thought they could all get through the portal before he recovered and came for them.
But Taksidian was faster than they thought, or the portal was slower. Only the father had been able to go through. The others, apparently realizing their plan wasn’t working, were now going for the antechambers on the third floor.
Taksidian slapped Phemus’s arm and pointed. “Get the little girl,” he said. He turned to see that the younger boy, David, had fallen at the intersection of the main hallway and the shorter one that ran toward the back of the house, ending at the false walls. His brother was helping him up, throwing frightened glances at Taksidian.
Taksidian whipped the knife back and forth in front of him. “This is too easy,” he said.
Xander turned to look toward the false walls—still out of Taksidian’s sight. The boy yelled, “Go, Mom, go! We’re right behind you!”
Taksidian was mere feet away, thinking the little one’s ear would make a fine trophy, when the brothers sprang up and darted away. He could overtake them. When they hit the stairs he’d be able to slice at their legs, which would drop them. Then he could finish the job.
The door in the first wall was wide open, so the boys were able to go through it quickly. They turned right toward the second wall’s doorway.
Taksidian was right on them, stepping through the first opening as the closest boy—David—was going through the second one. Taksidian was in the space between the walls, mid-way between doorways, when he heard someone yell: “Now, Mom! Now!”
The door in front of him slammed shut, just as the one behind him did too, throwing him into complete darkness. He hit the door and pushed. The door wouldn’t budge. He heard latches rattling from the other side—and the same sound coming from the other side of the first door, as well.
He leaped to the door behind him, hoping to open it before it locked. Too late. He slammed his shoulder into it. Solid.
Hmmm, he thought. Now what?
CHAPTER
fifty-nine
SATURDAY, 1:37 P. M.
Phemus lumbered toward Toria. She screamed and yanked open the closet door. She stepped in and pulled the door shut behind her. Phemus reached the closet and opened it. Empty. He stepped away to glance into the rooms at the end of the hall, the empty one and the boys’ bedroom. He returned to the closet. Towels and sheets lay on the floor, piled up on the back wall. He leaned in to examine them.
Dad came out of the bedroom behind him and rammed his shoulder into Phemus’s backside with all of his strength. Phemus fell, grabbing at shelves to break his fall. The wood splintered and broke, spilling linens down on him.
Dad swung the door around. A protruding leg kept it from closing. Dad stomped on Phemus’s foot. It disappeared through the opening, and he clicked the door closed.
He spun, put his back to the door, and slid down to sit on the floor. He felt a light breeze whooshing out from under the door, going up under his shirt, chilling his back.
He prayed that Toria had gotten out of the locker before Phemus went to it. David h
ad given her specific instruc-tions for getting the locker unlatched from the inside, but she’d never gone through this portal. Probably they should have sent someone else, like David or Xander, who’d at least gone through the locker before. But Dad had wanted Toria out of the house in case something went wrong, and Xander had insisted on staying with David. Their plan had been slapped together in seconds, with no time to think it through.
He only hoped their haste didn’t result in tragedy.
“Gee?” he hollered.
“We got him!” his wife called back from around the corner in the short hallway.
He leaned his head against the door and closed his eyes.
Please, Toria, he thought. Be all right.
•••••••••
In a corridor of the Pinedale Middle and High School, Toria frantically tried to get the padlock off the locker next to the one she had just stepped out of. It had been hanging from the latch, unlocked, as Xander said it would be. He had told her that he and David had shifted the lock from the portal locker to the other one the day before, when they’d gone through to the house.
Something screamed from inside the portal-locker. She jumped and realized it was metal, stretching and pulling— Phemus was coming through!
She pulled the lock off and turned to the latch of locker 119. She tried to slip it through the latch’s hole, but the locker door suddenly bulged out. She dropped the lock. She grabbed it and tried again, moving her hand with the wildly flexing door. She got the lock on and snapped it closed.
She backed away from the locker, which moaned and screeched like an angry animal. A bulge the size of a half bowl-ing ball popped up in the locker’s sloping top.
Phemus’s head, she thought. The metal stopped its cries, replaced by Phemus’s growls and howls. The whole row of lockers rattled and shook as he moved around inside. He started pounding, but the sound was muffled and the door wasn’t moving much. She thought he had mistaken the back of the locker for the front—that, or he was too big to move around and was throwing his fists into anything he could reach.
How someone that big could fit in the locker’s narrow space she didn’t know. But somehow, he was in there.
She looked around. It was Saturday, so the halls were empty and the overhead lights turned off. The only light came in through a window at the end of the hall. Creepy like this, espe-cially knowing what was in the locker, trying to get out.
She ran toward the windows and the hallway on that side of the building. That would be the way out, she thought. From her back pocket, she yanked out the mobile phone Keal had lent her and flipped it open. She punched a speed-dial button. After three rings, someone answered.
“Keal?” she said. “It’s Toria!” She looked over her shoulder at the locker. It was shaking and vibrating like it was an earth-quake, not a man, trapped inside. “I need a ride.”
CHAPTER
sixty
SATURDAY, 1:58 P. M.
David sat beside his brother on the steps leading up to the third-floor hallway. As they had been doing for the past twenty minutes, they gazed at the locked door in front of them, set in the false wall at the base of the stairs. Keal had installed a gate-type latch on this side of the wall. A pad-lock hung from a hole in the latch, keeping it from opening. David knew a latch-and-lock setup was also on the house side of the other wall, where Mom was. There was no way anyone locked between the two walls could escape . . . he hoped.
“What do you think he’s doing in there?” he said.
“Thinking of a way out,” Xander said. He was cupping a hand over his wounded chin.
“Think he’ll find it?”
“Not before the cops come,” Xander said.
“Cops?” David said, disappointed. “That’s what Dad’s doing— calling the cops?”
Xander shrugged. “I think. What else?”
“But Taksidian owns them. That’s not going to help.”
“All we have to do is keep him away from you long enough for this to heal,” Xander said, moving his hand away to look at the blood. There was a lot of it. “Dad said as soon as we change one of the things Jesse’s dad described, then none of it can happen.”
“We have to wait for your chin to heal?” David said. “That could take days.”
Something banged in the hall above them. David and Xander spun around and ran up to the landing.
“It’s an antechamber door,” David observed. Bright light poured out of the small room, filling the end of the hallway. “What are we going to do? We’re trapped on this side of the wall.”
They watched, but no one came through.
David gasped and grabbed Xander’s arm. “Dad’s a genius,” he said.
“What?” Xander said. “How?”
“Remember how Time came to take Jesse and Nana away?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Xander said. “They spent so much time in history, Time thought they belonged to it. That’s why they had to leave the house and go to the motel.” His head began bobbing up and down. “And it’s not just people who spend too much time in history, but people from history, too.”
“It’s coming for him,” David said, laughing. “It’s coming for Taksidian!”
“All right,” Xander said, “I agree with you this time. Dad is a genius. We’ll wait until we know the pull on Taksidian is super strong, then we’ll unlock the door. He’ll get sucked right in!”
A noise erupted from the wall below: Bam! Bam! Bam!
“What’s that?” David said.
“The sound of panic,” Xander said, showing David his teeth.
David smiled, but it didn’t last long. He said, “What if he gets out first? Or what if he stabs me while he’s getting pulled away?”
Xander nudged him. “You still think we can’t change the future?”
“I don’t know. You were there, you wrote that note. It seems so . . . sure.”
Xander lifted the metal plate he had bought from the black-smith. “Time for this,” he said.
“What are you going to do, cut Taksidian with it? Hit him over the head?” That really wasn’t such a bad idea. Time would have no problem taking him if he were unconscious.
“You ever see a Fistful of Dollars?”
“That old Clint Eastwood western?” David said. “Sure, but . . . “ Xander looked at him slyly. “Pull up your shirt.”
CHAPTER
sixty-one
SATURDAY, 2:12 P. M.
Mom looked at the knife blade sticking through the gap in the door. It was pushing into the back of the latch that locked Taksidian between the walls.
Bam! Bam!
“He’s pounding it through,” she said.
“He must have found a piece of wood in there,” Dad said. “He’s using it like a hammer.” He rubbed her shoulder.
“Don’t worry, the latch is really screwed in. It can’t—“
Bam!
A screw came an inch out of the wall.
Bam! Bam!
Two inches . . . and another screw joined it.
“Ed!”
Dad pushed on it with his hands. The blade disappeared and came right back, slicing into Dad’s fingers. He yanked his hands away. The blade quickly found the latch again and— Bam!—knocked the screws farther out.
Dad spun and pressed his back against the wall-like door. The pounding stopped.
Mom leaned over the lock. “It’s gone,” she whispered.
The blade broke through the door, an inch from Dad’s head.
Mom screamed, and Dad jumped away.
Xander’s voice reached them: “Mom! Mom! What’s happening?”
“Stay there, Xander!” Dad yelled back.
“Yes!” Taksidian said. “Stay there, Xander. I’m taking care of everything.” He laughed.
Bam!
The latch rattled, barely clinging to the wall. Mom realized that one more hit, and it would fly off. She slapped the door. “Stop it!” she yelled.
Taksidian did what
she expected him to do: he plunged the knife blade through the door again—high up, near the place she’d slapped. She grabbed the tip, coming at it from the top, away from its sharp edge. She felt it slip through her fingers, and it disappeared, leaving a hole that looked like a vending machine’s coin slot.
Dad ran to a pile of wood and snatched up a six-foot length of two-by-four. He returned and wedged it between the floor and the lock.
Bam!
The hasp flew off—and the door crashed open, hard enough to send the end of the two-by-four into Dad’s nose. He stumbled back.
“Ed!” Mom yelled. She stepped toward him, then started to spin back toward the door. Taksidian grabbed her from behind, and she screamed, a loud, long wail of anguish.
CHAPTER
sixty-two
SATURDAY, AT THE SAME TIME
Toria stretched up as high as the seat belt would let her. She and Keal had just turned onto Main Street, heading home. “Hurry,” she said.
“You said Taksidian was alone?” Keal said.
“Now he is,” Toria said. “I told you, me and Daddy got Phemus to follow me.” When she had last looked, the big guy was still pounding away at the inside of the locker. It was shaking more than ever, because it had pulled out a little bit from the wall.
“But you didn’t see anyone else in the house?” Keal said. “No other people like Phemus?”
Toria shook her head. “Daddy said they were going to trick Taksidian and lock him in the room between the walls.”
“I hope he . . . “ Keal’s voice faded. He squinted out the windshield. His mouth dropped open.
Toria looked. A man was walking on the side of the road, taking big long strides, swinging his arms. He wore a hospital gown. The back of it was mostly open; it was closed in only one place, barely covering his rear end.
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